Worlds Elsewhere: Globalization and Early Cultures

April 19-20, 2014
at the University of California, Irvine

Keynote: Alexander Huang, George Washington University

Abstracts due: December 16th to early.cultures.conference@gmail.com

We are pleased to announce the Sixth Annual Graduate Student Conference for the Group for the Study of Early Cultures at The University of California, Irvine.  This year’s conference moves from last year’s theme of space and displacement to considering issues of globalization and transnationality in Early Cultures.

Entitled “Worlds Elsewhere: Globalization and Early Cultures,” the conference aims to expand critical understanding of issues surrounding globalization, nationality and transnationality, and cross-border considerations and encounters in the context of historical and contemporary accounts, adaptations, and considerations of Early Cultures (classical through eighteenth-century) and their literary and artistic products. Our mission is to help develop a complex narrative about cultures that crosses temporal and geographical as well as disciplinary boundaries.

ECC 2014 will examine different cultural frameworks, compelling us to rethink what we assume to be our global position and relation within and with respect to the organization of early cultures. From globalization and transnational shifts to the movement of objects, persons, cultures, languages, and practices, pre-modern and early modern world cultures can lead us to new insights and new paths for interpretation.

Addressing the ways in which globalization and mobility have led to new meanings, uses, and interpretations allows for an opportunity to discuss the methodological and theoretical potentialities of these approaches for the study and teaching of early cultures.  Deriving from theoretical frameworks that question traditional modes of thinking about nations, nationalities, and the permeable boundaries between them allows this new generation of scholars to discover and establish links between cultures and periods. Globalization and transnationalism open up research into porous boundaries, reconfigurations of social, cultural, and mobile political identity, in addition to consideration of exchanges between earlier cultures and our contemporary frame of reference.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

·         Trade and Global Transactions

·         Cosmopolitanism

·         Global Order and Governance

·         The Local and the Global

·         Violence within and Across Borders

·         Boundaries and Boundary Permeability

·         Economics and Commerce

·         Cultural Constructions of Identity, Ethnicity, and Nationality

·         Citizenship, Broadly or Narrowly Construed

·         Artistic Exchange and Global Cross-Fertilization